Yeah it takes an hour just to cruise around in the van! It used to be even bigger years ago and employed around 21,000 workers (compared to around 3000 today). Right up the north end by the power plant there used to be another 2 blast furnaces (5 in total) and a coke ovens both literally out the back gardens of the houses nearby! Bet it was nice living there. Miles and miles of cable tunnels under here aswel, some turn of the century! Part of my job was to keep them pumped out. Very eerie when you reach a flooded section and all you can hear is drip drip drip...! or worse still when the sprinker system is so rusty that it decides to rupture and start filling the tunnel up fast, and trying to put a clamp on to seal it just makes it worse because it crumbles the pipework even more! Brown trousers time when you got an 8 bar head of water wanting to drown you lol!BLOODY HELL, so much for maggie thatcher stamping out britains mining industrie, that place is bloody massive.
Check out how big Port Talbot steel works still is! 6 miles by 2miles!
http://maps.google.c...r...mp;t=h&z=13
And then check out the roof of my mini (metallic blue) in the powerplant car park!
http://maps.google.c...r...mp;t=h&z=20
As irrelavnt to mini's as this all may seem. of course this is where the steel for them was made, and indeed still is, for heritage panels and shells.
So above is just a tiny snapshot of the work that goes on behind the scenes in a very run-down works to keep the metal coming out enabling our mini's to be made!
Unfortunately the quality of steel that rover ordered was far below that of say toyota which odered the highest quality steel, hence some of the rust problems we get with our cars!
